History and Future of Open Source AllChars

Joe took over AllChars v3 from Jeroen around February 2007.

AllChars v3.x is the original code written by Jeroen.

Version 4

AllChars v4 includes extensions to behave (more) like a Compose key and to allow binding the hotkey to keys like Menu, Windows key, Caps Lock etc.; also it is built using a slightly more modern version of Turbo Delphi (resulting in the use of different Delphi runtime libraries).

The by AllChars v3/v4 used keyboard hooking API used (it leads to the injection of the AllChr32.dll into all running processes which process keyboard events) and the Delphi runtime libraries makes it difficult to get AllChars to run under Windows Vista.

Version 5

Therefore, Joe ported AllChars v4 to C#/.NET in February/March 2007.
In order to get better Vista compatibility, Joe implemented a keyboard
hooking routine against a more modern Windows API in June, this no
longer requries a DLL to be injected in all procosses. AllChars v5 is
now 100% C#.

As the newer hooking API is not available in older
versions of Windows (anything not NT-generation, basically) AllChars v4
will need to stay available in its current form.

By using XML/DOM/XPath evaluation, configuration binding to an XML file is easily achieved with very little code.

Currently, ( - time permitting - ) Joe is working on the macro editor.

Help is always welcome! See the projectpage on SourceForge for more information.